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“I’m changing the subject. Apologies for my tardiness.”
“You know better ’n to think Idon’tknowbetter. You gave us a fright, but don’t apologize. The only reason you’d ever stay away is if you were hurt or suspected trouble was following you.”
I glanced at my son. Guilt cleaved through my ribs, a permanent emotion if there ever was one. “I’ll ask Nicu’s forgiveness in the morning.”
Setting my shirt and her thread on the table, Jinny grabbed my hand. “You mind this. What happened was out of your control. You’d as soon battle an army of leenixes to be here.”
This was the story no one at court knew. I had a son, a radiant son for whom I’d willingly rest my neck on the executioner’s block. His mother, a raven-haired spitfire, had been crossing through the wildflower forest with her nomadic family when we met.
Wandering from their camp on that fateful dawn, she had found me practicing handstands on a fallen tree trunk. I’d been bare-chested and cut a decent seventeen-year-old figure. Which was why the spitfire—eighteen, she boasted—stayed to watch.
Then she stayed for more after we fumbled past the introductions.
We had challenged one another to a balancing competition on that trunk. By the end of it, I’d lost. She had cheated by hitching up her skirt and feasting her gaze on me so greedily, so smugly, that I’d known where things were headed.
Naturally, my erection agreed with her. In that spirit, I’d found myself grasping that log for dear life whilst the female straddled my cock and rode me until my eyes slid to the back of my brainless head.
Afterward, she walked home with me, sucked my mouth into another kiss, and never returned. However, she was polite enough to leave me a token of her gratitude on Jinny’s doorstep nine months later. Oh, the irony of history repeating itself.
Those green irises proved the infant was mine. He didn’t know me yet, but he’d gurgled a laugh and extended a pair of chubby arms, demanding to be held. Henceforth, the little one owned me.
He had made another noise, something that sounded likenicuuuuuto my ears, so that’s what I called him. I liked the idea of my son naming himself.
In the beginning, it had been easy to miss the signs, for infants did incomprehensible things and wept daily. They could be as temperamental and fussy as Nicu had been. However, his appearance—disproportionate features that belonged in a folktale—had immediately given me pause. He could be a fae with that expansive grin, and the way his wide eyes jumped from his face and his nose condensed into it. I ignored the signs, too anxious to do otherwise.
But it wasn’t until Nicu approached his second year that I noticed something singular about his behavior. My son had a giant heart. Yet I hadn’t realized how giant until we passed a peddler on the road, whom Nicu sprang to. He’d tackled the shocked man’s leg and asked if the stranger wanted to come home with us for dinner and be eternal friends.
That was how Tumble joined our family. I’d purchased the critter to distract Nicu, to pry him from the man’s limb.
I had clung to a theory. Living far outside the villages made my son thirsty for attention, as I’d been growing up. As such, Tumble and my son became inseparable. With Nicu isolated and cloistered from other children, Tumble gave him the friendship he’d been deprived of.
In any case, Nicu was about as shy as his father. At a midnight festival, he once trotted out of my sight to greet a stranger and sit on their lap without permission. In such mystical places where dramatics abounded, he managed to blend in and evade suspicion, and his social aggression was excused because of his age—to a point. For his face had given shrewd people cause to look twice.
I might have predicted he’d outgrow his excitability, except I knew my son inside and out. My gut began to feel the permanence of it.
Jinny and I watched him carefully. As he became more extreme—random monologues and inventive, fictional rants that surpassed his years, and utter devotion to anyone crossing paths with us between hamlets and towns—our uncertainties took root.
Who was to say Nicu wouldn’t one day stumble into the wrong pair of arms?
We ceased taking him on outings. It ensured that locals forgot about him entirely, as people did when engulfed in their own demons and raptures.
Enter the second act. For not only did Nicu lob his friendliness at whomever he met, but he got lost easily and couldn’t tell his bedroom from the kitchen. All manner of spaces, distances, and directions puzzled him.
Enter the third and final act, shy of his third year. I asked him to fetch a bucket for Jinny, and he disappeared outside the cottage, then returned with one of our chickens instead.
“Here,” he’d said, handing the animal to a bewildered Jinny.
The scene iced me with terror. It would take a dozen more occurrences like this to be certain, but already I knew. In the intolerant eyes of The Dark Seasons, my son possessed a slanted mind.
At the time, we couldn’t afford a physician, much less trust one to examine Nicu in secret. Turning in such undisclosed prey to the Crown amounted to rewards.
Desperate for answers, I traveled to neighboring villages to strike up hypothetical, random conversations with anyone skilled in the healing arts. Feigning nonchalance, I picked their brains but came up empty-handed. I couldn’t identify what caused my son’s condition, what it was called, or what to do about it.
There was that saying. Keep your enemies close.
A month after the chicken incident, destiny threw me into the monarchy’s path, when I entered myself into an acrobatic match at a midnight festival. A knight of Spring had viewed the spectacle and reported me to Basil and Fatima, who in turn summoned me to perform for them.
Within days, I became the new Court Jester.
